A wide variety of wireless communication techniques have been developed to facilitate wireless telecommunication. The wireless communication techniques include code division multiple access (CDMA), frequency division multiple access (FDMA), time division multiple access (TDMA), and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). The above wireless communication techniques may be delivered according to any of a variety of radio access technologies, such as Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), CDMA 2000, wideband CDMA (W-CDMA), CDMA 1xEV-DO, or the like. Another broad family of standards developed to facilitate wireless networking are the protocols defined by the various IEEE 801.11x standards.
Some example wireless communication devices that communicate using these techniques include cellular or satellite radiotelephones, radiotelephone base stations, computers that support one or more wireless networking standards, wireless access points for wireless networking, PCMCIA cards incorporated within portable computers, direct two-way communication devices, personal digital assistants (PDAs) equipped with wireless communication capabilities, and the like.
In wireless telecommunication, information is modulated to create one or more baseband waveforms, also referred to as baseband signals. The baseband waveforms may then be mixed with an electromagnetic carrier wave, which is sometimes referred to as an up-conversion process. The up-converted waveform produced by mixing the carrier wave with the modulated baseband waveform can be wirelessly transmitted to a receiving device, e.g., in accordance with one of the communication techniques described above. The receiving device mixes the baseband waveform from the received carrier wave with an intermediate frequency signal, which is sometimes referred to as a down-conversion process. Demodulation of the resulting down-converted baseband waveform can then be performed by the receiving device to obtain the modulated information.